Hermann Broch

Broch, Hermann (hĕrˈmän brôkh) [key], 1886–1951, Austrian novelist. Broch is one of the masters of European modernism. Influenced by Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and the Vienna Circle, his trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1931–32; tr. The Sleepwalkers, 1932) describes the disintegration of social values and of organic coherence in the modern world. Der Tod des Virgil (1945; tr. The Death of Virgil, 1945) is a lyrical, stream-of-consciousness novel stylistically evoking James Joyce. His Hugo von Hofmannstahl and His Time (1964, tr. 1984) is one of the great accounts of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Also a mathematician and businessman, Broch lived in the United States after 1938.